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Save Ohio’s Libraries! Governor Strickland of Ohio has recommended the elimination of $200+ million from the Public Library Fund over the next two years. This means libraries will close, librarians will be laid off, and children all over Ohio won’t be able to access books!

Also Known As Harper by Ann Haywood Leal- This one has been getting mentions all over the blogosphere so I am dying to get my hands on it!

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarite Engle- Last year Engle snuck up on me and snatched a Newbery Honor. So when I saw that Betsy Bird had this book on her Newbery 2010 contenders list, I knew I needed to to read it! Plus, I am always on the lookout for new Holocaust stories that focus on aspects of the tragedy that aren’t a part of the general curriculum at our grade level.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart by Jill Wolfson- I hate doctors and hospitals. I love books about medicine. Weird, huh? The novel focuses on the organ donation process and I am dying to read more.

Nothing but Ghosts by Beth Kephart- “How do you paint regret?” That sentence has been at the back of my mind ever since reading a review of Beth Kephart’s newest novel. I think I’ll be purchasing this one this week!

L.A. Candy by Lauren Conrad- So sue me, I love The Hills and Lauren Conrad! I am dying to see how this one is, because I’m hearing good things so far. Plus, who doesn’t love a little light, fluffy reading during the summer?

A few days ago Jen Robinson wrote a wonderful post at Booklights about “social reading”, after reading my post about student led book clubs in my classroom. Jen says,

But what I’d also love to see more of is kids recommending books back and forth that aren’t necessarily huge bestsellers. A kid recommending The Magic Thief or Alabama Moon to his best friend because he loves it, and he wants his friend to read it so that they can compare notes, and discuss it.

This is what should be happening in classrooms across the country and around the world! While plenty of my students have read Twilight and other popular books because of the social aspects (friend recommendations, movie tie-ins, etc), many more have read and recommended non-best-sellers. If you take a look at the list of books my students think shouldn’t be missed, you’ll see many books that might not be familiar. But they are familiar to my students. Each of them was introduced to the class either by my booktalk, a personal recommendation to a particular student, or when a student found it in the library.

But how does a book become a social read? How do we harness this power and repeat it over and over? I took a few minute to look over my classroom surveys and tried to find an example of a social read in my classroom. I found the perfect example. One of the most popular student recommended books in my classroom for two years running is Cirque du Freak series .

I read the first book in Darren Shan’s series a few years ago. While well-written, it’s definitely not my kind of book. However, it’s a great example of the horror genre and I booktalk it every year. While I may not want to read the whole series, it’s the perfect book for a dormant reader.

This year, I booktalked the series to the class as a whole. One student raised his hand and requested to read my copy. I handed it over and told him to let me know what he thought after reading it. A few days later, that dormant reader was almost done the book and couldn’t stop talking to me about it. I explained that I didn’t love the book but outlined my reasons why. We not only had a great discussion about finding the right book for the right reader, but also about why he loved the book. Within the week, he had moved onto the second book in the series.

While conferencing about his reading, I noticed a few of my other students listening in. I decided to take a few minutes at the end of a class period to have the students share what they were reading and some brief thoughts, thinking it might spark an interest in a few other students. My dormant reader did his own book talk for Cirque du Freak: A Living Nightmare and man, was he good! He talked it up way better than I could have, because he genuinely loved the book. Before I could even take out the other copies I had, 5 hands were waving in the air. Students who struggled to find a book, students who abandoned books like it was nothing- all requesting to read Cirque du Freak: A Living Nightmare.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. I figured one or two of the students might finish the book, with the others moving on from the book as quickly as they moved on from other books they had attempted. I knew only a little about each student as a reader (it was very early in the year), and Darren Shan’s books didn’t seem like the right match for them. The students all settled down that day with their copy of the book and began reading.

I did make one change to our reading time at that point. The boys reading Cirque du Freak: A Living Nightmare begged to sit near each other during reading time and I let them. It was the best decision I could have made. I watched as that group of boys expanded over the year, with new readers entering the fold every week and the original readers staying put, reading the rest of the books in the series. They would quietly answer each other’s questions, discuss predictions, and jokingly cover their ears if someone who was ahead of them in the series began to talk about a spoiler. It was amazing to watch. The best part? The only I did was provide the initial booktalk that hooked ONE dormant reader. His enthusiasm spread to more readers, and then to more. It was a domino effect.

Over the course of the year, Cirque du Freak became a best-seller in my classroom. I fully attribute that to the students talking to each other about their books. At the end of the year four of my students had finished the entire series, two moved on to reading The Demonata #1: Lord Loss: Book 1 in the Demonata series, and about 10 were at various points in the original series. Why? Because I allowed reading the books to be social. They didn’t talk to each other during independent reading, other than to answer questions quietly, but they did talk about the books constantly. The students carried their books around all day, competed with each other to see who made the best predictions and who read the series the fastest, and they constantly recommended the series to other students.

Social reading is such a powerful concept and one of the best ways yo get students to enjoy books and reading. How do we do that?

Start with teachers who are enthusiastic about books!

Booktalk, booktalk, booktalk. Make your students aware of their choices.

Allow kids to be passionate about their book choices. Maybe they don’t choose to read the books you think are “literary” or otherwise worthy, but they are reading. And those books will be a gateway to more books.

Kids are social creatures by nature. If they are talking about books, encourage it! Give them an opportunity to talk about their books, but without doing a book report or graded booktalk. Attaching these social opportunities to a graded assignment makes it a pressure-filled situation for the kids and they won’t enjoy it. They’ll be too busy worrying about their own grade to listen to what anyone else has to say.

Cultivate those scenarios where kids are talking about books. Whether it’s in the hallways, at lunch, or in your classroom- keep the conversation going! Don’t talk down to your kids or pass judgement on their reading choices. Just let them read!

Make sure books are available! If they fall in love with a series, figure out a way to get copies of the books. Let their parents know what they are reading, have the school librarian order more copies, scour garage sales, etc. I also have my students make book donations at the end of the year, donating books to the classroom that they no longer need. Needless to say, I now own more than my fair share of Darren Shan’s books. ;) But do everything you can to make books available to your students!

Social reading is so very powerful. It’s also so easy to grow in our classrooms and homes. Kids are opinionated and they know what they like. While they love to hear our ideas and recommendations (as long as they believe in us and know we aren’t being fake), they love to hear from their peers even more.

When my students leave my classroom and move on to the middle school they express concern that they won’t have me to rely on anymore for books. My response? I’m just a crutch they are used to having. Most of them are long past the days of relying solely on my booktalks and recommendations to choose their books. I remind them that they will always be surrounded with peers and friends and classmates. That’s a huge pool of resources just waiting to be tapped! As long as everyone does their part, continuing to read and share their books, my students will always have books to read. It’s a culture- a reading culture- and we need to start cultivating it in our schools!

Do you have any suggestions on how to maintain balance with conventions and other areas of writing based on assessments? I know focusing too heavily on conventions will negatively affect their other areas of writing (even if they are already demonstrating strengths in the other areas), but I would also like for them to get a better grasp on the conventions expectations for 7th grade.

This is a very good, and important, question.

Yes, you are correct: it is true that focusing too heavily on conventions can negatively impact writing performance. Ironically, a complete focus on teaching grammar out of context can actually cause students to decrease their achievement in grammar and in writing quality.

There are two great resources that are practical and full of ideas you can implement right away: Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop and Everyday Editing by Jeff Anderson. Jeff has created classroom-tested, grammar-in-context ideas for upper elementary, middle, and high school students. The best part? The lessons and ideas are organized so that you can easily access which skill you want students to work on (e.g., sentence fragment corrections, subject verb agreement, correct use of commas, correct use of capitalization, etc.).

I know many teachers who have used Jeff’s ideas, and I have used them myself. Jeff believes we can help our students to become better writers while they internalize conventions if we ask them to notice what is right about well crafted sentences. Instead of using sentence correction exercises, Jeff suggests we display well-written sentences that feature a skill we want students to work on, and then ask the students what they notice about the craft and the mechanics that make the sentence correct. It is an inquiry based approach to teaching grammar (rather than an error-correction approach), and it works.

I will be moving from 40-some odd students this year to close to 120 next year. What is your advice for managing writing assessment for a group this large? (in middle school).

This is such a challenge. You have so much to think about when you teach this many students, and it is so easy to become overwhelmed.

My first piece of advice is to carefully plan your instruction with some built in places for you to read short samples of student work for very specific purposes.
Let me try to explain what I mean by walking through a suggested framework based on a specific unit of study.

I will choose personal narrative as a genre study just because it is so common across grade levels. If this explanation does not provide enough specific suggestions for your context, do not hesitate to let me know and I will walk through a different genre.

When I teach any genre, I want to know first if student is able to make meaning in this genre. (I owe a tremendous debt to Carl Anderson and his book Assessing Writers for many of the ideas that follow).

So, if I want to know if students can make meaning in the genre of personal narrative, I will ask them to respond to a series of quick writes that require them to narrate and describe situations they have experienced:

Tell about a time you were afraid (or happy, or proud, or…)

Describe your favorite place (or food, or season, or holiday, or video game, or sport…)

These are just ideas- anything that you can use to motivate students to write for five or ten minutes will work. When you collect these short samples, you can begin to see if students can make meaning in this genre – we must narrate and describe (among other things) when we tell stories about our lives, so I want to know very early on if students can do the work of writers who create personal narratives.

So the beginning of each unit involves quick writes, which can be assessed quite easily. I can also assess students as they study mentor texts, particularly if I ask them to try their hand at mimicking the crafts they notice in these texts.

These short writing pieces will be worth only a few points each, but they will allow me to predict the future success of the unit.

Students can begin to draft longer pieces as they develop an awareness of the features of the genre. You can develop a list of these features together based on what you notice as you read like writers.

As soon as students begin drafting, you are in great danger of becoming overwhelmed by the paper load. My advice is to read each draft for very specific purposes, and to ask students to revise drafts based on what you notice they need to work on. Keep a positive attitude by first admiring what they are doing well, and then looking for teaching points. When you discover teaching points all students can benefit from, then you have an idea for a mini lesson. When you discover teaching points a few students can benefit from, you have ideas for small group work or you have conference topics.

One typical reason I read early drafts is to just establish if students understand the structure or organization of the genre. In keeping with personal narrative example, I first read drafts to see if they can keep ideas focused while using a narrative flow. If they get stuck in describing every insignificant detail, I can work with them on keeping the narrative moving. If they jump from event to event and develop a list-like story, then I can work with them on slowing down the moment.

The last section of my book provides some more detail about this topic of reading student writing for singular purposes.

I hope this provides you with enough to think about… please let me know if it helps!

And, you can enter a contest! Contest details In his new book Mark discusses how a writing prompt that might seem limiting actually helps students focus their writing. He talks about a second-grade classroom where students were excited to write about the following topic: “Your baby brother is inside the house and you are locked out and need to figure out a way to get back in.”

As one of the final activities on our final day of school, I had my students fill out “Recommend a Book” postcards for next year’s 6th graders. I reminded them that on the first day of school they thought I was out of mind when I said they would read between 20-40 books over the course of the year and that they would enjoy it. We talked about how they discovered the joys of reading books they liked, recommending books to each other, and learning about new books from their classmates.

Each student chose one book that they feel all 6th graders must read. Next year, I will make a bulletin board out of the postcards and share these recommendations with my new classes. Sometimes, they don’t want to listen to me but will gladly hear recommendations from each other.🙂